The Plot Against Social Security

How the Bush Plan Is Endangering Our Financial Future

Michael A. Hiltzik

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Description

Relentless and ominous, the drumbeat echoes across the land: Social Security is on the verge of bankruptcy. These repeated warnings have become a dismal article of faith for the millions of Americans who pay Social Security taxes and expect to collect benefits someday. But they are flatly untrue.

Social Security today is on a stronger financial footing than it has been for decades. The Plot Against Social Security will explain who is really behind the efforts to “reform” this system and will show that the most frequently proposed fix—increased privatization—will damage it beyond repair by undermining retirement security for generations to come. Award-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik also offers a clear set of remedies for those few elements of Social Security that do need repair—proposals that will shore up the most efficient social insurance program in America’s history, rather than destroying it in the name of reform.

From Publishers Weekly

May 23, 2005 – A Pulitzer Prize winning financial journalist for the Los Angeles Times, Hiltzik gathers arguments made by a plethora of economists and skeptics into a comprehensive, biting critique of the privatization agenda and what he calls the "astroturf" alliance of right-wing ideologues, Wall Street opportunists and Republican political operatives that "aims to propagate, and then exploit, public ignorance." Prophecies of the Social Security trust fund's bankruptcy, he finds, are based on dubious and politically biased forecasts; more realistic projections have the trust fund growing nicely over the next 75 years. Even if doomsayers' predictions come true, he notes, the system's solvency can be safeguarded by straightforward fixes; simply lifting the cap on Social Security taxes thus taxing high-income workers at the same rate as everyone else would make up Bush's projected shortfall and then some, he says. Hiltzik also reads the fine print of privatization schemes, unearthing what he sees as hidden costs, risks, benefit cuts, bureaucratic pitfalls and wildly optimistic market return predictions for private accounts. The real issue, he contends, is whether the pension system will be a get-rich-quick scheme for the powerful or a collective guarantee that the elderly, the poor, the disabled and the unfortunate will be shielded from the vicissitudes of life.